Another Beautiful Idea…

Over the years, one of my catch phrases has gradually become “There’s another beautiful idea, ruined by people.” It’s a take-off on an old “Bloom County” punch line about a beautiful theory being slain by an ugly fact, but it’s actually getting better legs every year I read about concepts that are beautiful in theory, but can never work for as long as people insist on remaining people. There’s a reason that Communism has never really worked on a large scale, for example; it’s the same reason that people cheat on their income taxes, that public officials use their power and influence for personal gain, and that some academics take advantage of the tenure system to harass (sexually and otherwise) vulnerable students, even though they know (and will sometimes even admit) that these things are wrong. And you’d be hard pressed to find a better example than what is happening to the Occupy movement lately…

I’m not commenting here about the ideals of the movement – although I will probably post about the platform represented by the “99% Declaration” we’ve been hearing about online at some future point. The basic ideas behind OWS, including the corruption of our government by financial interests and the resulting dramatic financial inequality in this country are hard to argue with (since they can be supported with hard data), and the outrage that people feel over some of the worst excesses are completely justified. In particular, the fact that small businesspeople can’t get loans regardless of how solid their credit might be, while giant companies that have nearly destroyed our whole way of life can repeatedly get Federal bailouts, or the idea of “job creators” paying no taxes on million-dollar incomes while simultaneously sending millions of jobs overseas, are enough to make any reasonable person want to pick up a protest sign and march in the streets. Unfortunately, trying to move beyond that pure ideal seems to be causing some problems…

The obvious manifestation is the increasing crime we’re seeing in and around the OWS encampments themselves. There’s no way of telling exactly how much of it has been inflated (or just made up out of the whole cloth) by news media, but there have been enough reports of homeless people using the encampments to get free food and shelter, local criminals stealing things from the protesters (and others) and then hiding out in the camps, and (over the past week) drug overdoses, suicides and shootings that I think we can probably conclude that the people associated with OWS are a microcosm of the United States as a whole. By itself this shouldn’t be a problem; it’s predictable that someone will take advantage of anything offered for free, that crime will happen anywhere it can, and that people who are sufficiently invested in their cause to camp out in cold-weather cities in November will include people who will either get violent or abuse whatever substances they use to get through the day. These are the things that people do, after all…

And therein lies the problem. In an ideal world, people wouldn’t try to take advantage of a popular grassroots movement for their own personal gain, but in an ideal world people wouldn’t be using their power and influence to get our national government to do things that make no financial, legal, practical, strategic or democratic sense. As of this morning, every far-right group in the country is using these events to denounce the OWS movement and all of the local governments that would just love to order all of protesters occupying their towns to go home are using these issues as justification for doing so – and anyone with an elementary grasp of strategy, history or psychology could have predicted these reactions. Real social change is possible, and the will of the people can be translated into tangible reforms. But expecting people not to take advantage of the situation just because they can is every bit as naïve as the opposition to the movement claims it is, and runs the risk of overshadowing the determination, commitment and idealism of the protesters with the side effects of a faith in human nature not supported by the facts…